Think of Warhammer 40K, All Tomorrows, Mass Effect, or Halo, you have humanity – the underdog – and the Big Bad – usually some cosmic force capable of eradicating the galaxy. Usually, despite how grimdark they can be, these settings sell you hope – that somehow humanity and allied species would prevail against all odds.
Well, in our setting, there is none of that because the galaxy is dead…presumably.
What remains of life and civilization is mostly on the Great Ark, Infinity Horizon.
So, what killed it all?
It’s the Deluge.
Explaining the Deluge
We’re all good guys in our story, and the Deluge thinks no different. It is a corrupted and mutated entity, descendant of an ancient race called the Hakra. It is responsible for the first and second Great Cataclysms that befell the galaxy, ending most of the galactic civilizations.
So why does it think it is good?
To everyone else bearing witness to the Deluge, they are a horrifying force of nature, a true eldritch horror made manifest, consuming all life it encounters – unrelenting and immeasurable. However, in the Deluge’s own (hive) mind, it is a benevolent entity bringing all other sentient life into the blissful fold of the communion. Alone, one is constrained by their mortality and personal competence. However, through communion, they lose the worries of their individuality and become ‘embraced’ by the greater whole – their consciousness and memories now part of the collective.
And this is what makes it so inevitable. In a way, it is a higher form of evolution capable of outmatching even the most powerful AI that other civilizations wield because it combines the intelligence and memories of over a quintillion consumed souls across history.
How big is a quintillion? Here it is as a number:
1,000,000,000,000,000,000
With an entity this powerful, what’s preventing it from consuming the Ark, the most biologically dense habitat in the galaxy?
That mystery is explored in my upcoming novel, and the answer is pretty interesting. If you’re curious, support the Patreon so the novel can be finished faster. But’s here one detail – which explains how the ark ended up being home to fallen pre-space age cultures.
Against the unrelenting onslaught of the Deluge, the Bea’viskar Empire, lacking the time to evacuate, simply sealed off the structure as they fled, preventing any life signature from being detected within. The populations inside, left to their own devices and cut off from the wider resources that had sustained their high standards of living, would collapse into anarchy and a prolonged decline. Over thousands of years, their descendants would lose much of their original knowledge and technology, regressing into a patchwork of kingdoms, city-states, tribes, and republics, all existing at vastly different levels of development and each preserving different fragments of a forgotten Golden age.
The Empire’s decision may sound callous, but, in a way, it was the only decision that prevented life from facing certain annihilation, at least in hindsight.
Now, on to describing the ark itself.
Infinity Horizon
Infinity Horizon is a Dyson Sphere with its inner surface serving as a habitat. The megastructure is old, older than anatomically modern humans have been around, and it is named so because from the perspective of a person on the ground, the horizon seems to stretch endlessly. At 0.04 AU in radius, it has a surface area nearly 88 million times that of Earth. To put it in perspective, an Asia-sized continent would occupy roughly the same proportion of the Ark as Vatican City occupies of Earth.
At present, it serves as the last refuge of sentient life in a galaxy cleansed by the deluge – the last 0.9 percent of living biomass that remains unaffected. Those who live within it remain completely unaware that existence beyond their world has already ended.
The sphere revolves around an artificial white dwarf star, which fluctuates in brightness every 27 Earth hours, representing on the inner surface ‘night’ and ‘day.’ The star drifts in a subtle engineered wobble, causing light to sweep across the inner world in long cycles and create seasonal variation across different regions of the Dyson sphere.
The Cycle (Yuga)
A central theme of the setting is the concept of cosmic cycles – the destruction and renewal of worlds – with a particular focus on how knowledge, life, and civilization are preserved through the transition from one age to the next.
The Deluge is one manifestation of this cycle, as are the rise and fall of the myriad civilizations that have inhabited the Milky Way.
Yet the cycle is also mirrored on a smaller scale within the Ark itself.
For an unknown time since being sealed off, countless civilizations have risen, prospered, fallen, and turned to ashes on this space ark, only for the pattern to repeat again. Roughly every 10 thousand years, the dwarf star heats up, scorching the surface and undoing a lot of progress that sentient life has made on the surface. As the star cools again, survivors build upon the ruins, and the Cycle repeats.
Because more of the ancient technology and knowledge become lost with the end of each cycle, successive civilizations are condemned to a lesser state than the last. However, this isn’t absolute because the current age is merely one phase of a larger process of fall and renewal. In time, a civilization may arise capable of advancing far enough to transcend, achieving moksha – a period of true progress and enlightenment. Whether this will ever come to pass remains to be seen. For now, the cycle continues, and the space ark endures, as it has for countless millennia.
In sum, Infinity Horizon is less a story of the end times and more an epic on continuity: carrying civilization through cosmic resets.